That's the magic part, it uses Bing and Google but manages to get good results!

I've recently seen queries answered on Kagi that returns utter rubbish when I paste the exact same queries into Google or DDG.

I don’t see what’s magical about taking results from other sites lol. What happens if bing and Google block them?

I’m skeptical of their privacy policy as well, given that you need an account and have to pay, it’s unlikely they don’t know your searches.

They are paying for API access, not scraping results. Why would they be blocked?

Where did you see that they’re paying for API access? Their FAQ says that they’re making anonymized requests but don’t go into more details than that.

That being said, even if they did pay if they have any traction at all they’d still be blocked. Why would their competitors help them?

In any case I doubt it will take off, people who are poor aren’t going to pay 10 bucks a month just to search when there are dozens of free competitors.

Happy to be proven wrong.

If they were just illegitly scraping results, they could not provide any kind of consistency in quality as they would be getting blocked on and off. And the small search engines like DDG, Startpage, Ecosia, etc have been making these kinds of deals for more than a decade and with more users than Kagi is likely to ever have without having their contracts terminated due to "too much traction".

Late but I have texted a number of times with the Kagi team and they do pay for API access.

>That's the magic part, it uses Bing and Google

That's the part I want to avoid. Build your own crawlers and stop relying on Google. Google already has enough control over the internet, I do not want a search engine that's just downstream of them.

Ok. I see. But I cannot do that.

I can however use a search engine that doesn't mock me and second guess me all the time and that tries to anonymize me.

But I agree very much with you.

If someone launches a search engine that works as well as Kagi and doesn't use either Google or Bing I'll happily pay a premium for that on top of of what I have already said I am willing to pay for Kagi.

Edit: In fact I already support a search engine with an independent index.

They are still a startup. If they can get the users/money, eventually depending on Google will be a risk/too expensive, and they'll start crawling themselves.